The truth continues… pic.twitter.com/yAWq36XeXC
— SIG SAUER (@sigsauerinc) March 13, 2025
The Washington State Criminal Justice System says it has permanently banned SIG SAUER P320 pistols from its training facilities. According to officials in the WSCJS, the ban came after their investigation revealed concerns that the firearm might discharge without pulling the trigger.
SIG has vigorously denies the assertion citing a wealth of evidence they’ve produced over the years since the first questions about the P320 were raised, plus the fact the WSCJS has never responded to their request to examine the firearm(s) on which their decision was based.
SIG has successfully defended more than a dozen similar claims and despite the fact they’ve had negative verdicts in a couple of recent cases, the company points out the lost cases are far from decided and remain under appeal.
An initial report published by SAN (Straight Arrow News) quotes a spokesperson for the WSCJS as saying, “A recruit’s firearm discharged, while drawing, without their finger on the trigger, injuring an instructor and another recruit.” SAN goes on to quote a New Hampshire Public Radio report regarding suits and claims from around the country. Those sources appear to have been conveniently supplied by plaintiffs attorneys.
Last week, The (Battle Ground, Washington) Reflector reported, “More law enforcement agencies reconsider use of popular Sig Sauer P320 handgun.” According to that report, nearly a dozen other agencies have “pulled the P320 from their arsenals due to concerns over misfirings.”
In every instance, there seems to be a now-familiar theme…the person who suffered their alleged “uncommanded discharge” was either putting the gun into or removing it from a holster.
Universally, fingers are claimed to have been nowhere near the trigger and the victims have “no idea” how it happened. Having caused a negligent discharge of my own in the past, I would have sworn my hand was nowhere near the trigger as well. But I know my gun handling has been far less casual after the ND than any time before.
As I’ve written in the past, despite unanswered questions about the “why” behind these incidents, bans are being enacted despite common threads running through these reports. Most involve police trainees and/or untrained civilians, often in undetermined situations of stress. And as trainers often remind all of us, under duress, small motor skills are the first thing to go. Unfortunately, the involuntary grasp or grip reaction isn’t one of them.
And, as is often the case when faced with a potential safety issue, WSCJS officials chose the simplest administrative answer to any complicated question: just ban the item in question.
SIG has rigorously investigated reported occurrences, and not just inside courtrooms. One recently was discredited due to suspicions of “shadetree gunsmithing” that may or may not have been performed on the P320s in question. The discharge, however, happened directly in front of a range owner and with the gun partially cased and fully holstered. As he explained to me, “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
Contrary to prior reporting, claims that the P320 is capable of firing without a trigger pull are without merit and have been soundly rejected as a matter of law by thirteen separate courts, including a unanimous jury verdict in SIG SAUER’s favor. The P320 is trusted by the U.S. military, law enforcement professionals, and responsible citizens worldwide. Sig Sauer is extremely proud of our outstanding safety record and quality firearms.
Yet SIG has been unable to convince every jury that statement is unequivocally true.
In June, 2024, a Georgia jury awarded more than $2.3 million to a Georgia man who claimed injury from a holstered P320 that he said fired when no one touched the trigger. SIG appealed that decision, but on February 12 of this year, Federal Judge Eleanor R. Ross ruled against SIG, opining that SIG’s argument that the plaintiff’s attorneys had introduced “inflammatory” and irrelevant evidence was “unpersuasive.” She also declined to drop the judgement, writing . . .
The court declines to reconsider its ruling that plaintiff’s experts were qualified to provide expert testimony in this case … Instead, the proper remedy to defendant’s critiques of plaintiff’s experts’ testimony was to allow defendant to vigorously cross-examine plaintiff’s experts and for the court to carefully instruct the jury on plaintiff’s burden of proof, as was done at trial.
Recently, SIG has taken a far more aggressive stance toward these claims. Their “It ends today” statement of March 7 implies SIG is going on the offensive PR wise. In today’s litigious society, the threat of a response from the industry’s largest company is normally a pretty effective deterrent.
But my feature last weeky demonstrated pretty clearly that not everyone was threatened, much less quietened by the statement. In fact, it sparked a mix of funny memes and more than a few considered ruminations on “the P320 question.”
One, however, is especially noteworthy in light of SIG’s ominous admonition to the industry . . .
Industry, take notice; ; what’s happening today to SIG SAUER with the anti-gun mob and their lawfare tactics will happen tomorrow at another firearms manufacturer, and then another. Today, for SIG SAUER – it ends.
At least one company noticed and responded this way . . .
feels like a good time to bring this back pic.twitter.com/qLXtKfYEPz
— Smith & Wesson Inc. (@Smith_WessonInc) March 11, 2025
On March 11 Smith & Wesson’s X account re-released a video of influencer Garand Thumb dropping his S&W M&P pistol from shoulder height to the ground…with nothing happening. The explanation for the re-release of the video is simple and pointed: “feels like a good time to bring this back.”
Ouch!
We’ll keep you posted.
Sig Saur is in the process of giving Every Town the example of what a bad gun company looks like.
If this had been Hi Point you never hear the end of the jokes. And the criticism of that low cost gun company.
And this is about getting and keeping a military contract.
As I’ve said before. Gun companies like Sig are the orginal military industrial complex. It’s guns the left was after in the early 20th century.
They should have issued a mandatory recall years ago. Instead, these guns will be resold to other people as used guns. And they’ll be more lawsuits ten or twenty years in the future.
So now an ND is being referred to as an “uncommanded discharge”?
Does anyone in the journalistic world realize that the precursor “un” means to undo or reverse from a previous state, and that “non” is the opposite of a related state? So, then, an uncommanded discharge would mean it was previously commanded, or intended. Makes no sense whatsoever.
Negligent discharge, people. Just like a clip is not a magazine, and a bullet is the same as a cartridge, etc.
(edit function never works here)
“a bullet is not the same as a cartridge.”
Good one, Sig. As the Brits would say, “pull the other one, it has bells on.”
It’s amazing just how many M&Ps are being blamed seemingly every week for negligent discharges. And the number of police departments that are blaming pistols other than the P320 and banning it and swapping to something else is deafening — as in, the silence is deafening.
Hey Sig, continue to blame the customer, that’s a winning strategy for sure. Not.
There’s something wrong with the P320. The flat trigger seems the most likely culprit, Sig eliminated it and it’s just a fact that it makes the trigger that much easier to pull (or have it be unintentionally moved), and pretty much every other polymer gun maker uses a trigger safet, and they don’t have nearly the number of issues and lawsuits that Sig has. Perhaps there’s a correlation?
But no, Sig will continue to bluster and lie and blame the consumer because their stance is their pistols have NEVER fired without the trigger being pulled. Even when TTAG demonstrated on video that the original P320 could absolutely fire when dropped, with nobody anywhere near the trigger, Sig insisted that it wasn’t true and absolutely refused to recall them to fix it, instead they again blamed the customer and claimed to offer a “voluntary upgrade”. Yeah, thanks Sig, how do you say “oops, our pistol is a bad design” without actually saying “our pistol is a bad design”?
“Faultless! Faultless, I tell you. There has never been a problem with the P320, Never!” Reminds me very much of Baghdad Bob. I think I’ll call them Baghdad Sig from now on.